The Canadian Commonwealth eBook

In one section of the western prairie are 150,000
Galicians. Of Austrians and Germans—­the
Germans chiefly from Austria and Russia—­there
are 800,000 in Canada, or a population equal to the
city of Montreal. Of Italians at last report
there were fully 60,000 in Canada. In one era
of seven years there took up permanent abode in Canada
121,000 Austrians, 50,000 Jews, 60,000 Italians, 60,000
Poles and Russians, 40,000 Scandinavians. When
you consider that by actual count in the United States
in 1900, 1,000 foreign-born immigrants had 612 children,
compared to 1,000 Americans having 296 children, it
is simply inconceivable but that this vast influx
of alien life should not work tremendous and portentous
changes in Canada’s life, as a similar influx
has completely changed the face of some American institutions
in twenty years. Immigration to Canada has jumped
from 54,000 in 1851-1861 to 142,000 in 1881-1891,
and to 2,000,000 in 1901-1911. It has not come
in feeble rivulets that lost their identity in the
main current—­as in the United States up
to 1840. It has come to Canada in inundating
floods.

Chief mention has been made of the races from the
south of Europe because the races from the north of
Europe assimilate so quickly that their identity is
lost. Of Scandinavians there are in Canada some
fifty thousand; of Icelanders, easily twenty thousand;
and so quickly do they merge with Canadian life that
you forget they are foreigners. I was a child
in Winnipeg when the first Icelanders arrived, and
their rise has been a national epic. I do not
believe the first few hundreds had fifty dollars among
them. They slept under high board sidewalks
for the first nights and erected tar-paper shanties
on vacant lots the next day. In these they housed
the first winter. Though we Winnipeggers did
not realize it, it must have been a dreadful winter
to them. Their clothing was of the scantest.
Many were without underwear. They lived ten
and twenty to a house. The men sawed wood at
a dollar and a half a day. The women worked out
at one dollar a day. In a few weeks each family
had bought a cow and rudiments of winter clothes.
By spring they had money to go out on their homesteads.
During winter some of the grown men attended school
to learn English. Teachers declared they never
witnessed such swift mastery of learning. To-day
the Icelanders are the most prosperous settlers in
Manitoba. The same story could be told of German
Mennonites driven from Russia by religious persecution
and of Scandinavians driven abroad by poverty.
Of course, the weak went to the wall and died, and
didn’t whine about the dying, though some mother’s
heart must have broken in silence. I recall one
splendid young fellow who walked through every grade
the public schools afforded, and then through the
high school, and was on the point of graduating in
medicine when he died from sheer mental and physical
exhaustion. This type of settler will build up
Canada’s national ideals. It is the other
type that gives one pause.